


For the Last Time

by asianlychallengedasian



Category: OMORI (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Confessions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings, Gen, Kel-centric, M/M, Sallys there but not really, Unbeta'd, but not in the way you think, implied child neglect, the aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28727217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asianlychallengedasian/pseuds/asianlychallengedasian
Summary: Sunny shows up outside of Kel’s house one autumn evening, drenched to the bone. Kel thinks nothing of it.He invites him in.
Relationships: Kel & Sunny (OMORI), Kel/Sunny (OMORI)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 349





	For the Last Time

**Author's Note:**

> I decided Sunkel is a ship now hope you enjoy

“I’m seventeen,” Kel whines to no one in particular, “Why am I stuck here doing  _ nothing? _ ” He stretches over the back of the couch. His lanky legs still reach the floor despite him almost doing a backbend to reach the other side of the couch. He may not be quite as tall as Hero, but he’d gladly boast that he is the tallest on his basketball team.

But no, that’s completely offtopic, and Kel is  _ upset.  _ He’s  _ bored.  _ A toddler crawls around the room, and he stares at his little sister. Why did  _ he  _ have to be the one to watch her?

Well, he knows why, but that doesn’t mean he had to be happy about it. She gurgles and laughs at seemingly nothing. Kel huffs.

“Laughing at my misery, are you, Sal?” Kel mopes, before he crawls over to her. “I’ll teach you--” And he scoops her into his lap, and begins to tickle the one- nearly two- year old. Sally squeals, a pure laugh coming from her little lungs.

Kel smiles, a little bit of his boredom resolved. He leaves the poor toddler alone, and watches her for a while, until he hears the door bell go off.

Kel suspects nothing of it, and goes to answer it. Finally, his parents are home, and he’s off of babysitting duty. He would much rather be doing… Well, it was raining, so he couldn’t practice, but he’d find something else to do.

He unlocks the door and swiftly opens it. “Welcome home, M--”

The figure in front of him is drenched from head to toe, tacky tee shirt and sweatpants sagging with the weight of water. The boy looks skinny, but not emaciated, like the last time he saw him. His dark hair drooped in front of his bad eye, leaving his good eye exposed. 

His eye is the same as it was that day. Terrified, yet resigned. Almost… Dead.

“Sunny?!” Kel exclaims, dragging the boy inside without a second thought. “You’re- soaked! Why are you here?”

Sunny looks at Kel confused. Luckily, Kel is fluent in Sunny’s language.

“Because you’re soaked to the bone and you’re my best friend and I don’t know why you’re here, Sunny!” He says incredulously.

Sunny’s eye shuts resolutely, and Kel takes it as a sign to begin dragging him upstairs to his room. “You’re half frozen, how long were you out there?” And when Sunny shrugs, Kel rushes them up the stairs faster. Sunny got sick easily enough even before he lost all of his weight, and though he’d gained some of it back he still was underweight, if Kel could tell.

Kel and Sunny make it to his room, and Sunny drips all over the floor. Kel rummages through his drawer, and grabs out a change of clothes.

“Here, get changed. Go ahead and get changed in here.” 

Sunny processes for a minute, then begins to change out of his soaking clothes. He pulls off the shirt to reveal a black binder underneath, then swiftly tries to pull the dry shirt over the binder.

“No, binder too. You’ve probably been wearing it for too long, anyway.” Kel tests the waters with a small joke.

Sunny looks at the boy embarrasedly, before motioning Kel to turn around. Kel grins and does as the smaller boy asks. He at least seems more cognizant than he was when he walked in. ‘Course, that wasn’t much of an uptick, given how he looked when he walked in. He looked haunted. He saw those eyes before, that day that changed their friendship forever. 

Kel couldn’t hold a grudge, even if it was as extreme as… death. He was angry-- livid even, for the first week after Sunny left. He just didn’t get it. How- and why- did Sunny do that? Nonetheless, Sunny  _ and  _ Basil? 

But with time, that anger subsided. Months passed, and he doesn’t want to think about it anymore. It happened, but it was an accident. Sunny wouldn’t do anything like that on purpose. So he decided to try not to think about it. Just push it to the back of his mind, and not let it interfere with his friendship anymore. He doesn’t want this death to kill anyone else.

Kel turns around after hearing the struggling sounds subside, and sees Sunny in his shirt. Sunny’s  _ engulfed  _ by the size of the orange long sleeve shirt, the shoulders nearly sliding off his small frame. The end of the shirt reaches his mid thighs, dressed in embarrassingly long shorts. Sunny has to hold them up in the back to keep them on his body. 

“I can see if I can find some more clothes that might fit you better,” Kel holds back a small laugh. It looks like a kid trying on his dad’s clothing. It’s comical, the difference in their sizes.

Sunny shakes his head, resigned with his fate. He’s sure that anything ‘smaller’ would engulf him just the same. Kel actually laughs at that, and Sunny seemingly lets it happen.

After Kel finishes his spell, he does look at Sunny a little more intently. His hair is mostly dry at this point, a little frizzy from the humidity, and his eye patch has been discarded while it dried. His hair mostly covered the missing eye, but Kel didn’t have the guts to focus on that feature on him right now.

Sunny has gotten more sun ( _ Haha, get it? _ Kel points out,) since he’s last seen him, but the orange is still strikingly dark against his pale skin. His collarbones stick out from his upper chest, and Kel blushes and looks away as quickly as possible. The shirt forms sweater paws where Sunny’s bunched it up so he can stick his hands out of it.

_ He’s so cute,  _ Kel’s mind sighs.

_ I mean what,  _ Kel’s mind backtracks.

Kel pushes past this thought process, and pretends it didn’t happen. Like a lot of things. He instead begins to interrogate the boy. Things like, “How did you get here?”, “Why are you here,” and “Does your mom know?”

Sunny holds a hand up, telling him to pause for a moment. Kel reluctantly waits, until Sunny finally spills.

“I… Don’t really know.” His voice is gravelly, with the disuse of it showing blatantly. “I just ended up here. Don’t know why, don’t know how.”

Kel sighs, unsure of where to start. Sunny had always been somewhat spacy, but…  _ before _ , he had at least had Mari to keep him grounded. 

_ Mari,  _ Kel’s mind whispers. He ignores it.

Now that Mari’s gone, Sunny had gone from spacy to straight up disassociative, if Kel could tell by the three days he’d spent with him before he moved. He pauses. “Well, what  _ do  _ you remember?”

Sunny shrugs again, and Kel’s about to let out a sigh of frustration before Sunny speaks again. “I got let out from school.”

_ Good, so he’s going back to school,  _ Kel thinks.  _ But… Let out? _

“Mom wasn’t home again. She made me some steak for dinner tonight. I didn’t feel like steak.” Sunny’s monotone voice continues. “I…” Sunny rubs his eyes suddenly, and Kel steps closer to him, reaching to comfort the boy.

“I got sick. That’s what it was.” Sunny seemingly remembers.

Kel looks at him worried. “Dude, you’re sick and you came all this way?” That couldn’t help with the illness. 

Sunny shook his head. “No, not like that. Or, uh, yes like that.” He takes a deep inhale. “I… I thought of her again. I signed up for orchestra at school, and I…” He breathes, “I got there, and I panicked. I thought I was ready. But apparently, I wasn’t.”

“Oh,” Kel says,  _ that kind of sick.  _

“I ran off. And now I’m here, I guess.”

Kel doesn’t bother asking how Sunny managed to travel an hour  _ by car  _ without realizing it. It was a very Sunny thing to do. Kel just sort of… Stands there. He doesn’t know what to say or to do, because how could he say its okay? 

How could he say anything was okay? 

Kel shook his head. “Are you staying the night?”

Sunny pauses and shrugs. 

“You can just spend the night, it’s a weekend, isn’t it?” Kel immediately offered.

Sunny shrugs.

“I’m going to need a straight answer, dude,” Kel laughs. 

Sunny smiles a little bit. “I can, if you’ll have me.”

Kel scoffs, and takes that as a yes. “Course I’ll have you.” He then backtracks. “ _ Not  _ like that, of course!” He laughs awkwardly, and Sunny looks at him confusedly. It hadn’t even dawned on him. Now he would have to explain it. “It just-- sounded a bit like I was asking you out-- AUGH NEVERMIND.”

Sunny must’ve had some sort of devil in him, because he decided to say, “And that’s a bad thing?” Kel’s heart thumped heavily in his chest as Sunny looked on innocently. Definitely some sort of demon.

“LET'S MOVE ON PAST THAT ANYWAYS-” Kel exclaims before collapsing onto his bed. “I-I’ll sleep on the floor tonight. You take the bed.”

Sunny doesn’t have any objections, so he sits on the bed next to Kel. The clothing still droops off his body, maybe even more now that sitting pulls the shirt down, revealing the top of his chest. Sunny may had tanned some since he’d last seen him, but his chest is still a pasty white. It was the sort of pale that he wanted to touch it, maybe disturb its pastiness for some amount of time, for it was like water and he wants to dive in and  _ that’s sort of gay, Kel-- _

Kel looks up to Sunny’s eye. It’s dark and mysterious, but Kel can read it like a book. There’s worry, there’s content, there’s emotions he can’t name. One might say that that eye looks the same as Mari’s, but they’re wrong. Sunny’s eyes are like a storm cloud, and while Kel doesn’t quite remember what Mari’s eyes looked like, they had to have been different than what Sunny’s look like right now.

It’s quiet. Kel decides to speak. “How have you been? Aside from today.”

Sunny shrugs. Kel’s about to lose his god damn mind before Sunny decides to speak. “It’s been… Hard… But I’m alive. I’m seeing a therapist now.” Sunny says.

“And…?” Kel says. Sunny shrugs. Kel supposes that’s fair enough. “The basketball team is about to start competing, we’ll be going against Nearside soon.” Kel says. “Basil’s been sitting with me at lunch, he’s still quiet but he… yeah.” Kel looks over to Sunny. No reaction.

...And now, its awkward. Okay then. It stays quiet for a few more moments. Kel feels like he might explode.

“My therapist says that it wasn’t my fault.” Sunny says suddenly. It seems out of nowhere, but Kel catches what he’s saying. “Mari.” He says, as if it isn’t abundantly clear.

Kel nods, not interrupting. He isn’t sure if Sunny would finish if he said anything.

“He just doesn’t get it. I literally… I pushed her down those stairs. I killed her.” Sunny looks away, to the window. His hands are clasped tightly together, in a way that might hurt.

“You didn’t mean to--”

“He says that too!” Sunny’s voice raises, before he takes a deep breath. “And… I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Sunny looks at Kel.

“You want to know what I think?” Kel says.

Sunny nods.

Kel takes a moment to gather his thoughts, breathing deeply. He couldn’t seem to get the air necessary in though. He continues on. “Well, well I-” Kel tries to work his thoughts in a coherent string. “You… Really didn’t  _ mean  _ to push her down the stairs.” Kel starts. He looks at Sunny. Sunny is waiting patiently. Fuck. “And yeah she still… she still is… y'know. I don’t think you’re faultless. But it was an accident. I think that means something.” 

Sunny nods once, and his eyes darken. Kel said the wrong thing. 

“What do you want me to say?” Kel almost whines, “Because honestly, at this point I don’t think about it. I don’t  _ want  _ to think about it.” Kel scrubs at his face. “I don’t want to think about Mari dying, I don’t want to think of you killing her, I don’t want to think of how much you’ve been hurting  _ alone  _ these past years. There’s so much to unpack, and I’m just a kid, Sunny. So I don’t know what to tell you.”

Its silent. Kel looks to Sunny, but he’s unreadable. That… Was a lot to put on him. Kel’s about to apologize when Sunny shakes his head.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” Sunny says, and before Kel could object, Sunny continues. “I shouldn’t have asked you that. I understand that you can’t answer.” Sunny shuts his mouth before anything else can spill out.

It falls quiet for a few more minutes.

“I really hope it didn’t come off wrong,” Kel says. “Because I really didn’t mean it badly. It’s just… I really don’t think about it. Mari’s death has hurt everyone… Especially you and Basil.” Kel says. “I think you’ve suffered enough.”

Sunny looks up to Kel, tears in his eyes. Kel hasn’t seen Sunny cry since before Mari’s death. Even telling them their lie, he refused to cry. He must have been keeping this bottled up for a long while. Kel opens his arms.

Sunny gladly falls into them, and begins to sob. Kel hugs him tightly, and before he knows, tears flow over his eyes, too. The rain outside has slowed down, yet everything around them is flowing. Grief, sadness all wash away down the river of time.

It feels like forever happened in a second, but Sunny finally breaks away. He wipes his tears away, catching the breath he lost. They’re still close enough to be touching, but they simply just stare at each other. It’s calm.

There’s a loud cry coming from downstairs, and with it, Kel finally has a revelation. 

“Oh shit, Sally!” He exclaims, then slams the door open, leaving Sunny in the room, alone, windswept by Kel’s sudden absence.

Sunny lets out a loose laugh. He follows Kel into the night. Things still were mending, but they  _ were  _ mending. It gives Sunny hope that maybe one day;

_ Maybe one day things will be okay, again. _


End file.
